Enhancing Customer Satisfaction by Assuring Documentation Quality  

From the customer's perspective, an important and visible part of a product or service is its documentation. Bellcore's Technical Publications (Tech Pubs) organization uses a Quality Assurance (QA) program that focuses on enhancing customer satisfaction through delivering high-quality documentation. This program emphasizes a 'network' approach to documentation development, whereby technical writers can most efficiently use the support network of QA reviewers and management available to them. The Tech Pubs QA program draws on the needs of clients and the expertise of technical writers to strive to achieve the highest level of quality possible in producing documentation.

Dolese, Cathy and Tara Durkin. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Quality>User Centered Design

Improving Document Quality Through Customer Visits  

In an effort to improve the quality of our documentation, our Information Development department personally visited over 80 of our customers in 10 different locations across the United States. Our goal was to find out what we needed to do to create documentation that would satisfy our customers' needs. We came up with a process for planning our visits, gathering the information from our customers, implementing their requirements, and increasing communication with them. From the visits, we not only made changes that immediately satisfied our customers, but we created an environment for them to work with us as a team.

Lass, Laura W. and Wendy L. Reed. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Quality>User Centered Design